Jewish parents who sent their children off to college have known for a while that their progeny were going to be confronted with professors who use university classrooms to spread lies about Israel, and to make them feel guilty for proud Jews, proud Zionists and proud Americans.
After the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, they further learned that their children were likely to be harassed on college quads, in cafeterias and at university libraries by activists from campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association.
Still, this was a college problem—something to be faced in early adulthood. Not anymore.
Now the problem threatens to manifest itself in places like the Charles E. Brown Middle School in Newton, Mass., a city of 91,000 residents, about a third of whom are Jewish. The school has recently hired a pro-Palestinian propagandist—with alleged family ties to a member of Hamas’s military wing who participated in the events of Oct. 7—to teach social studies.
The new hire, Maryam Abu-Hasaballah, a recent graduate of the University of Connecticut, wrote her honors thesis condemning UConn for its response to the anti-Israel protests that erupted on the school’s main campus post-Oct. 7, during which Hamas murdered, raped and kidnapped its way across southern Israel.
In her 2025 thesis, Abu-Hasaballah—listed as a member of the teaching staff at Newton’s Charles E. Brown Middle School—accused UConn president Radenka Maric of using campus police to deprive the post-Oct. 7 protesters of their right to free speech because of a pro-Israel bias.
Abu-Hasaballah accused Maric of “doing nothing to accommodate, collaborate or work with [protesters] in the slightest,” adding that Maric’s “silence, personal ties to Israel and endorsement of police action only proved to the students that their fight was necessary at UConn.”
She also argued that UConn’s policy toward the protesters was motivated by “personal pro-Israeli interests” and “the bias of donors and close partners” who supported the school.
Personal ties to Hamas?
Abu-Hasaballah’s suggestion that Maric acted out of personal bias is ironic, given that Abu-Hasaballah’s own family apparently has familial ties to a member of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Imad Atta Hassouna.
The Times of Israel identified Hassouna as a Qassam member; Hamas-linked material independently corroborates that identification, with a memorial graphic bearing the Qassam Brigades emblem describing her as a “martyred Qassam fighter” who died on Oct. 18, 2023. The Israel Defense Forces identified Hassouna as one of several Gazan “soccer players” who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7. Both JNS and Jewish Onliner have reported on the IDF’s identification of Hassouna as a Hamas operative.
Hassouna also appears to have been Abu-Hasaballah’s first cousin. Maryam Abu-Hasaballah, who did not respond to a request for comment, is, according to a 2018 obituary, the daughter of Khamis Abu-Hasaballah.
In November 2023, the Hartford Courant quoted Khamis, a native of Nuseirat in central Gaza, describing the deaths of his sister Marwa’s husband and son. “Abu-Hasaballah said his sister Marwa’s husband and son were killed three weeks ago when a bomb was dropped on their house. Her son leaves a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old,” the paper reported.
The Courant also published a photograph, supplied by Khamis, captioned “Mohamed Hassouna, Khamis Abu’s nephew, who was killed Oct. 18.”
Palestinian database GIG Gaza provides another link: It records Muhammad Imad Atta Hassouna, 31, and Imad Atta Ibrahim Hassouna, 59, as killed at the same Hassouna family home in al-Zawaida on Oct. 18. Their names, ages, and shared circumstances strongly indicate that Imad was Marwa’s husband and Mohammed their son—making Mohammed Khamis’s nephew and Maryam’s first cousin.
“The family relationship is not evidence of Ms. Abu-Hasaballah’s own beliefs or conduct and should not be used to impute a relative’s actions to her,” wrote Lisa Shatz, a resident of nearby Brookline, Mass., who has written a memorandum on behalf of unnamed Newton parents worried about Abu-Hasaballah’s hiring. “It may nevertheless be relevant context for counsel when evaluating the thesis’s framing and treatment of Oct. 7 and the Gaza war.”
Thesis bias
A close reading of Abu-Hasaballah’s thesis reveals that the author glosses over the horrors of the Oct. 7 massacre. The phrase “Oct. 7” appears nowhere in the thesis, nor is there any mention of the violence Hamas perpetrated that day. The author describes Hamas as “a militant Palestinian nationalist group,” making no mention of its oft-repeated desire to destroy the Jewish state.
Her description of Israel, by contrast, is particularly harsh, largely affirming the UConn protesters’ assessment of the country as a genocidal outpost of settler colonialism. In her introduction, Abu-Hasaballah wrote that “the beginning of this war triggered [a] series of events that would eventually lead to the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government.”
Abu-Hasaballah also downplayed expressions of antisemitism by the UConn protesters she lionized. In particular, she accused the Trump administration, which threatened to deport foreign agitators to their countries of origin, of silencing “pro-Palestinian protest under the guise of scapegoating activists as antisemitic, aggressive or threatening.”
What she did not acknowledge, however, is that the protesters she defended had, according to campus officials, distributed leaflets depicting Maric “with red devil horns alongside images of missiles and dollar bills.”
Nirit Friedlander, an Israeli-American resident of Newton with three children who have attended the city’s schools, said she was “shocked by what she read in Abu-Hassaballah’s thesis.
“This is not simply a political opinion I disagree with,” she said. “Israel is portrayed throughout the thesis in an overwhelmingly hostile and one-sided way. Highly contested claims are repeatedly presented as fact, Israel is accused of genocide and collective punishment, while one of the most important facts needed to understand this war is almost entirely absent: the Oct. 7 massacre. There is virtually no meaningful discussion or condemnation of the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians that triggered the war.”
These omissions prompted Friedlander to wonder if anyone involved in hiring Abu-Hasaballah had actually read her thesis. “If they did, what exactly did they see in it that convinced them she had the balance, judgment and historical integrity to teach our children?” she asked.
Abu-Hasaballah’s one-sided narrative prompted StopAntisemitism, a nonprofit that combats anti-Jewish hate, to ask on X: “Will Hasaballah’s students receive an objective account of the Holocaust and modern Jewish history? Or will she use her anti-Israel position to distort the Holocaust and claim a faux genocide in Gaza?” (Anna Nolin, superintendent of Newton Public Schools, has not responded to a request for comment.)
The upshot is this: For years, Jewish parents could tell themselves they had until move-in day at college to prepare their children for an onslaught of anti-Israel propaganda. Now, for Newton parents, it’s the first day of school in the city in which they pay taxes.
